Good character consists of recognizing the selfishness that inheres in each of us and trying to balance it against the altruism to which we should all aspire. It is a difficult balance to strike, but no definition of goodness can be complete without it.
Alan Dershowitz
The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.
Alison Gopnik
There's no such thing as altruism.
Andrew Tobias
I would rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one.
Aneurin Bevan
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
Ayn Rand
I don't deny the importance of genetics. However, the fact that I might be altruistic isn't because I have a gene for altruism; the fact that I do something for my children at some cost to myself comes from a history that has operated on me.
B. F. Skinner
We, all of us, could do a much better job of evoking what someone has called the universal principle of human altruism: the urge in us all to help others who are in danger.
Bart Starr
Socialism states that you owe me something simply because I exist. Capitalism, by contrast, results in a sort of reality-forced altruism: I may not want to help you, I may dislike you, but if I don't give you a product or service you want, I will starve. Voluntary exchange is more moral than forced redistribution.
Ben Shapiro
Acknowledging someone is an act of altruism in the first place, so converting that act of altruism into a pizza party or company fleece jacket or a gift card is fine, but it's not in keeping with spirit in which it all began.
Charles Best
Pharmaceutical companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in new HIV/AIDS treatments not out of altruism but because they can make up those research costs in sales.
David Mixner
Altruism is innate, but it's not instinctual. Everybody's wired for it, but a switch has to be flipped.
David Rakoff
For thousands of years, human beings have been obsessed with beauty, truth, love, honor, altruism, courage, social relationships, art, and God. They all go together as subjective experiences, and it's a straw man to set God up as the delusion. If he is, then so is truth itself or beauty itself.
Deepak Chopra
We need to build websites with celebrity speakers who talk about the ideals of fairness, sharing, democratic cooperation, and altruism in public life.
I'm my mother's son, so when it comes to altruism and understanding how to do things to benefit a person's life... the women in my life have been much better than the men.
Dustin Lance Black
Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.
E. O. Wilson
In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.
Social motherliness has made women's struggle for liberty the loveliest synthesis of egoism and altruism.
Ellen Key
I am an actress, I earn money, I am well-known. I don't think it is altruism to become engaged in humanitarian work. It's the least one can do.
Emmanuelle Beart
I have spent over 50 years preaching and teaching the values of peace, mutual respect and altruism.
Fethullah Gulen
Chronically insecure people easily lose their altruism, tolerance, and respect for non-conformity. If they have no alternative on offer, they can be led to attribute their plight to strangers in their midst.
Guy Standing
Politicians should reflect on the well-documented fact that fearful, insecure people lose their sense of tolerance and altruism.
For many years, I tried to make New Year's resolutions. I made lists and shot for great heights: I would show altruism and exert moral strength, patience and all those other great attributes.
Before Darwin, our world was very religious. People saw altruism as something given by God for us to be good so that we could go to Paradise.
One of the great issues in biology is the origin of altruism - of why you would do something for someone else that could hurt you - and Darwin posited that it might be rooted in maternal instinct, in sacrificing yourself for your children.
When you work at Google and tell these engineers that their skill set is relevant to somebody in Iran who doesn't have access to information in their country or the rest of the world, it really inspires them to want to do something about it. There is a genuine altruism that exists at this company, and that's why I'm here and not anywhere else.
Effective altruism is a philosophy and social movement which tries to work out the most effective ways to improve the world. Effective altruists - conform to old-school utilitarian principles - consider all causes and actions, and then act in the way that they believe brings about the greatest positive impact.
Altruism is one of the most fundamentally social impulses, and doing things for others without expecting anything in return is core to what makes us human. This is why, from the day Facebook Platform launched in 2007, Causes has been honored to be one of the most popular applications, with over 140 million users.
In brief, egoism in its modern interpretation, is the antithesis, not of altruism, but of idealism.
Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.
Religion creates community, community creates altruism and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good... There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it the best tutorial in citizenship and good neighborliness.
Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.
Altruism raises your mood because it raises your self-esteem, which increases happiness. Plus, giving to others gets you outside of yourself and distracts you from your problems.
Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.
Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.
Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.
Altruism, especially involving basic freedoms, can be what shareholders value most.
Many of our moments of prosociality, of altruism and Good Samaritanism, are acts of restitution, attempts to counter our antisocial moments.
It's actually more than 700 case studies that show that, especially in times of crisis, we show our best selves. And we get this explosion of altruism and cooperation. This happens again and again after natural disasters, after earthquakes and after floodings.
Countries that intervene militarily rarely do so out of pure altruism.
Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance.
